by Kathy McKeon
“I don’t think I can do that,” I told her.
“What about a handkerchief?” she pressed.
I shrugged apologetically and shook my head.
I lapped up all the attention, but it felt so strange to be coming home as one of “the Yanks.” That’s what we always called the ones who emigrated to the States, and it was said with a mixture of envy and resentment. I remembered how excited my brothers and sisters and I were when Aunt Rose and Uncle Pat came to visit on Uncle Pat’s first trip back to Ireland in thirty years. Mam and Dad had scrimped and saved to lay on a welcome feast. There was a ham and a turkey both, plus sausages and cheese, and cakes and puddings. Before the guests arrived, Mam sent Packy to get a platter from the china cupboard where she kept her few precious pieces. Packy tried to climb it to reach a high shelf and before we knew it there was a terrible crash as the cupboard tipped over and broke everything to pieces. Packy escaped injury but ran out to hide in the fields so Dad wouldn’t beat him. I found him as dark fell and told him it was safe to come back. None of us had gotten to eat a thing, of course, since it was all for our guests. We just peeked in through the window with our mouths watering. Now not only was I one of “the Yanks” but I had also come back with a worldwide celebrity, no less. All I wanted right then, though, was to be back in my world, not hers. I went to find Rose O’Rourke.
“You should’ve told me you were coming, you could’ve stayed here!” Rose cried when she saw me at the door of the same house I used to clean. We hugged and made a pot of tea to catch up. Rose was still living at home, cleaning and cooking now for her bachelor brothers. Her forbidden sweetheart, Peter, had been killed right after I left, crushed beneath a tractor that toppled over while he was driving it. Rose never married and spent hours alone at his grave every Sunday. She seemed much older than I remembered, and weary before her time.
My weekend in Inniskeen ended too soon, and Mam was teary when it came time for me to go. She hadn’t been herself since Dad died, Aunt Bridge confided. I knew she pined to have her daughters back for good, but the money Briege and I sent home each month was still sorely needed. I promised myself that it would work out happily for everyone once I found a fellow immigrant to marry in New York and bring us back home to build a good life.
Mam and Packy decided to borrow the neighbor’s car to drive me back to Waterford so we’d have at least those few extra hours together. We were all in the kitchen back at Woodstown House when Madam surprised us by walking in. She was in her riding clothes.
“Oh, I’m so pleased to meet you!” she said after I’d made the introductions. “Please stay and have something to eat,” she added, asking the cook to make us tea. Apologizing for the interruption, she asked if she might borrow me.
“Can you help me with my boots?” she wanted to know.
I followed her to the drawing room for the familiar ritual that often turned comical as she braced herself back against a chair and stuck a leg out for me to straddle backward and pull on one of the tall boots as she resisted, until it finally came off. One time, we had a real struggle with it and she accidentally sent me flying across the room with her muddy footprint on my bum. We had both ended up laughing our heads off, Madam saying how sorry she was all the while.
After they’d finished their sandwiches and cups of tea, I saw Mam and Packy off and promised to come see them in Inniskeen again before returning to America. Week after week, though, Madam kept traveling herself or scheduling events that made it impossible for me to break away from my duties as governess on the trip. We were down to our very last week when I asked again if I could take a few days off to go say good-bye to my mother. “Kath, that’s simply not going to be possible,” Madam told me, adding that I could come back the following summer on my free yearly ticket.
I sent Mam a telegram saying I was sorry.
There was a fanfare at the airport to see Madam off, and from my plush leather seat in first class, I watched out the plane’s tiny window as Ireland, once again, slipped too fast away.
By the time the summer of 1968 arrived, the America we knew was doing the same.
SEVEN
Are They Coming to Get Us Next?
It had been my day off when Mugsy called to tell me Madam needed me back at work right away, and that I should be ready in ten minutes because he was on the way to come get me. He hung up before I could protest. I had been puttering around my little apartment, tidying up and enjoying the luxury of belonging to no one but myself for a day. Was that too much to ask? I was working my twinge of annoyance into a full-fledged grudge when the doorbell buzzed and I peered at Mugsy’s face through the peephole.
“Don’t you have a television?” he demanded the second I opened the door. “No, as a matter of fact, I do not,” I replied tartly before catching Mugsy’s troubled look.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Senator Kennedy was shot!”
How could he be shot? I thought dumbly, my mind unable to find traction on a thought so awful. It was the first week of June, we would all be back at the Cape soon, Bobby at the center of it all. Bobby was supposed to be laughing beneath a scrum of kids piling atop him on the lawn, or making everyone don Irish sweaters to go hear the Clancy Brothers perform at the Melody Tent in Hyannis. He was supposed to be holding court at his annual clambake for big political donors. Bobby Kennedy was supposed to follow in his brother’s footsteps as president, not as a martyr.
“She said to tell you to pack a bag,” Mugsy told me now.
For the funeral, I understood. The only black dress I had was a plain cotton one, like a uniform, really, but it would have to do. I put it in my old suitcase and followed Mugsy to the car.
Outside 1040, the sidewalk was already teeming with curious bystanders and journalists jockeying for position. Mugsy expertly elbowed us both through the throng, ignoring the shouts of reporters hoping to shove a microphone into the face of any family member or friend heading upstairs to pay respects.
Inside, Madam greeted me with a puffy face and swollen eyes.
“Will you go talk to John and Caroline?” she immediately asked, her voice a torn whisper. “Their uncle passed away.” She avoided speaking aloud the ugly words—shot, killed, murdered, assassinated—that already had nearly destroyed her not five years before.
“I’m so very sorry, Madam,” I murmured, uncertain what else I could say.
“I know, I know,” she said bitterly. “Same story all over again.”
She looked at me with such sad resignation before saying the two sentences that she would repeat over and over to grieving friends and admirers in the coming days. “We’ll all miss him dearly. He was a second father to my children.”
I knew Madam was counting on me to fill in for her while she prepared with the gathering family members and advisers for the difficult days ahead. She would be hosting a big buffet at 1040 for everyone the evening before the funeral. I found John and Caroline both crying in John’s room.
“Your Uncle Bobby is up in heaven looking down on you two,” I tried to console them, sadly realizing they had undoubtedly heard these same words after losing their father. “He’ll always take care of you.”
“Let’s go choose a dress for you to wear,” I suggested gently to Caroline. She knew without asking that I meant for the funeral. Obediently, she got up to lead me across the hall to her bedroom closet, where she picked out a pale-blue frock, one of the English ones with puffed sleeves and smocking that I knew she hated but her mother loved.
Back in John’s room, we found long shorts with braces and a white Peter Pan shirt. People were coming and going in the apartment, the phone and doorbell both ringing nonstop, but everything seemed muffled, as if sorrow had settled in like a fog.
I thought back to our magical summer just a year before in Ireland, when life had felt light as a birthday balloon. John and Caroline always adored hearing stories about Ireland, and I searched my memory for a fresh one to tell them now. I kne
w there was nothing I could say to make their hurt go away, but maybe I could offer some wee distraction, just for a while. Maybe I would tell them the story of my own uncle.
Dan was famous, but a strange fellow if ever you saw one. The story went like this:
He was my father’s uncle, actually, and I only remembered him being old, gimpy, and toothless. He lived by himself in a small house with a slate roof, so far into the fields that you couldn’t even get there by bicycle, just on foot. The path was too narrow and overgrown for even a horse and cart.
Dan would come to our house every night for a supper of thick porridge with milk my mam fixed for him. He would rap on the door with his walking stick, then duck around the corner to hide on us when we opened it, but of course we always knew who it was. He never came inside, preferring to take his tin cup full of the hot, pasty gruel and eat it while sitting on a large stone in the yard. He would tell us stories and sing us songs in Gaelic, and I had no idea what he was talking about. We had to study Gaelic in school, but it’s a very difficult language to learn, and quite tricky to pronounce. Dan had a gift for it, though, and he was known far and wide for his unusual mastery of it. Professors and scholars and reporters wanting to interview him had heard of a recluse in Inniskeen who spoke the language perfectly, and they used to track Dan down and trek to his cottage door, in hopes of a meeting or an enlightening evening at the pub. Dan always turned them away. He usually wouldn’t even answer their knocks. The visitors would ask my father what Dan liked, then leave little gifts on his stoop, hoping a bottle of whiskey or pouch of tobacco would soften him up, but Dan never budged.
I remembered one time when I was struggling with some Gaelic homework, growing frustrated with the complicated grammar and old-fashioned Celtic lettering. At my mother’s urging, I went to see Dan to ask for help. To my surprise, he readily obliged. Next thing I knew, though, the headmaster was waving my paper with its perfect score in my face, his cheeks flushed rosy with excitement.
“Kathleen, where did you get this?” he demanded.
“A book,” I lied.
“No, you didn’t! You got it off your uncle, I know it! I’ve tried to speak with him, but he wouldn’t see me!”
All these smart men assumed Dan considered them beneath his bother, unworthy keepers of our dying language. Or maybe he was just a mad hermit. I think the truth is that he just avoided everyone out of embarrassment. His clothes were old and raggedy, and when Dad gave him a nice shirt from our care packages from Aunt Rose and Uncle Pat in America, Dan would put on the clean shirt and then put his old dirty one on over it, to save the newer one. He didn’t have a proper jacket to wear out to supper or to the pub, and there wasn’t much he could eat anyway, toothless as he was. He stayed in because that was easiest, is all.
I didn’t tell the grieving Kennedy children how Dan had suffered a heart attack when I was around twelve, that the ambulance had to wait up on the lane while my father and Packy carried him through the fields, with me holding Dan’s head up so it didn’t drop. I saw his lips suddenly turn blue, and Dad told us to set him down. Uncle Dan died before the medics could even reach him. When you’re just a child, the image of death stays with you in a more powerful way than when you’re an adult who’s had a lifetime already to ponder it.
That’s why I remembered the silence after Dan’s last breath more vividly than the melody of his lost language.
More than two thousand mourners had filled St. Patrick’s Cathedral for Bobby’s requiem Mass, including President and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hollywood stars like Cary Grant and Shirley MacLaine, who had considered him a close friend. Leonard Bernstein conducted the symphony orchestra, and Andy Williams sang a heart-wrenching “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” one of Bobby’s favorite ballads. From my seat with the rest of the Kennedy help in the middle of the vast cathedral, I searched out the familiar silhouettes of Madam and the children in a front pew with the rest of the family. As I listened to Teddy eulogize his last brother as “a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it,” I felt my heart fill with deep pride that I had known such a man, and sorrow that we all had lost him now. When the service was over, we filed out of the cool, dark cathedral and into the humid noon to follow the hearse to the train that would carry Bobby’s coffin to Washington.
I met up with Madam and the children on board in the car reserved for the family, and hurried to get John and Caroline settled as the train lurched out of Penn Station into the sunlight of a joyless spring day. I made sure to keep an eagle eye on seven-year-old John; he was more wound up than usual from the past few days, and I knew how hard it must have been for him to stay still during the long church service. (“Be sure to take a change of clothes for the children, Kath,” Madam had reminded me as I packed everyone up that morning, “especially John.” They would need to be presentable when we arrived in Washington. Did I know, she wondered, where her black veil was?)
As we got under way, John quickly latched on to his best buddy, William Kennedy Smith, and the two cousins were soon crawling around on the floor with their toy cars. True to form, John was a mess even before waiters came through the train with the trays of sandwiches and soft drinks for us. They offered baskets with coloring books, games, and cards to the children. “Wouldn’t you like to play some checkers now?” I cajoled the boys. “Or a hand of Old Maid?” I glanced over at Caroline, wishing she could be distracted as easily. No ten-year-old should be so used to this, I thought helplessly. Caroline, too, had sought out her closest cousin and best friend. Courtney Kennedy was just eleven herself. As the train rolled through the big cities, small towns, and open fields where mourners lined the tracks by the tens of thousands to bid farewell, the two girls clung to each other and sobbed, Bobby’s daughter and John’s.
Bobby’s casket was in the last car of the funeral train.
There was no way the children could not have seen—and kept on seeing—the image of their beloved uncle on that kitchen floor of the Los Angeles hotel where he had been shot multiple times after winning the Democratic primary in California. The horrifying picture was on the front page of every newspaper and tabloid, and was being shown again and again on television.
Bobby’s own twelve-year-old son, David, had witnessed it on the TV alone in his hotel room in LA that night. He had been put to bed and was thought to be sleeping, but he had secretly stayed awake to watch his father’s victory speech around midnight. He saw Bobby flash the cheering crowd a peace sign before he left the podium, and he heard the loud gunshots and panicked screams before the news cameras panned to Bobby lying motionless on that kitchen floor as someone cried: “Senator Robert F. Kennedy has been shot!”
In the chaos and confusion that followed, it was hours before anyone thought to go check on David.
He looked like he was still in shock, sitting on the funeral train amid his brothers and cousins but at the same time somewhere far away and by himself.
As the train clacked slowly south, I prayed that Bobby’s life, not his death, would create the image that would linger not only for his own children but also for the nieces and nephews who loved him so. I wondered how Madam would get through this, what unbearable anguish her brave face must be masking. I caught a glimpse of her a few seats away, dabbing at tears as her sister murmured words of comfort, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she wasn’t reliving those horrific moments in the backseat of that limousine in Dallas.
Grandma Rose sat nearby, too, eyes closed as her gnarled fingers moved bead by bead, prayer by prayer, through the rosary she held. There was a priest holding his rosary, too, as he stopped to murmur words of comfort. Caroline and Courtney, joined by their cousins Maria and Sydney, wept together, while Bobby’s boys seemed lost in their own hurt silence. The adults mostly got through the awful hours with practiced grace and anguished stone faces. Ethel was threading her way through the train’s twenty cars with her oldest son, fifteen-year-old Joe, the two of them bravely determined to personally than
k the seven hundred–plus friends and dignitaries who had been invited to accompany the family to the graveside service at Arlington National Cemetery.
Coretta Scott King was aboard, in widow’s black, mere weeks since burying her own assassinated husband. Madam had attended Dr. King’s funeral. “They murdered that man for no reason!” she had said as we packed, her gentle voice sharp with anger and distress. I had unpacked her bag from Atlanta only to pack it right back up again with nothing but black clothes.
My mind drifted as the train chugged slowly down the tracks. It felt as if we were at the center of the world that day, yet shielded from it at the same time. I’d had that same sense of distant remove within a Kennedy cocoon the time a massive power outage had doused every light in New York City. From the fifteenth floor of 1040, I’d had no clue of the true chaos below, with nearly a million people trapped underground in subway cars, and National Guardsmen called out to stop looting in the streets. Madam had plenty of candles on reserve for dinner parties, and the apartment was soon softly aglow. The open flames made me nervous, and I kept checking to see where the children were, especially John. I didn’t like the idea of a curious, active five-year-old anywhere near a flame. At one point, I was in the kitchen with the cook and waitress when we heard a sharp tapping noise coming from inside the closed pantry. We all jumped, asking each other what it was. “Maybe a rat,” someone whispered. The noise came again, louder and more insistent. If that’s a rat, it’s gotten into a lot more Yodels than I ever did, I thought. And not only was it huge, but it had learned to talk as well.
“Please open up!”
Where was the Secret Service when giant, talking rats were demanding to be let in to rob us in the dark or God knows what?
